Jane Hirshfield's two new books -- The Lives of the Heart, a volume of poetry, and Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, a collection of essays -- have more than poetry in common; both are born from a relentless looking, an eye that won't turn away. About her new poems, the bulk of which explore the idea of the heart, she says, "I simply followed what kept calling me to look at it." And the essays, written over a span of ten years, are each well-considered studies on both the craft and role of poetry. "My job as a human being as well as a writer," Hirshfield says, "is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further."

Vigilant in this pursuit of the spiritual, drawing on her long-time study of Zen Buddhism and life-long commitment to writing, Hirshfield has left a trail of poetry in her wake. She has written three other volumes of poetry -- The October Palace (1994), Of Gravity & Angels (1988), and Alaya (1982) -- has translated a volume of Japanese poetry, The Ink Dark Moon (1990), and has put together an anthology of 43 centuries of women's spiritual writing, Women In Praise of the Sacred (1994).

Jane Hirshfield spoke recently with Atlantic Unbound's Katie Bolick.

Poems by Jane Hirshfield from The Atlantic Monthly (with readings in RealAudio):

Your new collection of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, and your latest volume of poems, The Lives of the Heart, have the same publication date. Were you working on these books simultaneously? If so, how did writing
aboutpoetry affect the writing of the poems themselves?

The essays of Nine Gates were written over a ten-year period; many
predate the work in The Lives of the Heart. Still, I think the direction
of influence goes more the other way -- rather than the essays' abstract
thinking directing the progress of my poetry, I'd say that it's because I value
poetry in its particular, poem-by-poem life that I wanted to deepen my
understanding of the poetic mind. The questions I've found of interest are the
questions of a working writer rather than a critic, though I hope they prove
illuminating to readers of poems as well as other writers.

I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've
looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry's gestures in the broadest
sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer from the inside. There's
a difference in how you experience an art form when it's engaged with from
within; even a little practice with dance lets you feel a ballet inside your
body rather than simply as something observed. I also know that looking closely
at the workings of others' poems has taught me to feel more closely the turns
and images of my own, and has increased my range of response to the world as a
whole. That is one of the main gifts poetry brings.

Robert Hass writes in his essay "One Body: Some Notes on Form" that it is
from repetition that "our first sense of the power of mastery comes." And Basho,
the most celebrated Japanese poet of his day, claimed that after supreme
concentration on an object, "the essential nature of the object can be perceived." The
Lives of the Heart alludes to or clearly depicts a heart in a great many of
its poems. Was this a practice in repetition, supreme concentration, or neither?

It was not at all calculated. When I was finishing my last book,
The October Palace, something in me kept saying, "No, write six more poems." Six
poems later I still didn't feel like the book was done, and I thought again, "Six more poems."
During that second batch of "six more poems" I began to write a slightly
different kind of poem, and in each there was a heart and in many also a lion.
I thought of them as the "heart-lion" poems, and it turned out, after The
October Palace was finished and printed, that I was not done with them yet.

Obsession is not quite the right word for it ... but it's the closest I can
come. Something had grabbed hold of my psyche and interest and emotions and I
needed to keep working it out. I don't know if I can claim this as "supreme
concentration"; it felt more like a recurrent dream. In the dream life you
don't deliberately set out to dream about a house night after night; the dream
itself insists you look at whatever is trying to come into visibility. There
was something I needed to return to regarding the many lives of the heart, and
though I knew that "heart" is one of those words -- like "dream" or "poetry" --
that poets are not supposed to use, I felt that, as person and poet, it would
be disastrous to
turn away from a subject that kept coming up.

What do you think it was about the heart that compelled you?

Part of poetry's core activity, both within an individual and within a culture,
is to attend to and make visible what Jung called the shadow life. Whatever it is
that isn't being sufficiently attended to, poetry will be magnetically drawn
toward. Perhaps these poems came to me because I hadn't been looking thoroughly
enough at the activity of my own heart -- I had fallen asleep in a way, or had
been looking overly outward. And certainly the heart is denigrated by our
culture, which values the intellect and neglects the emotional, or cheapens it
to the dulled formulas of mass media. Perhaps I was looking in those poems
for a container of concentration and words with which to try to do better, to
counteract that dulling, both inward and outward.

It's also true that for some years a central task in my life has been to try to
affirm the difficult parts of my experience; that attempt is what many of the
heart poems address. It's easy to say yes to being happy, but it's harder to
agree to grief and loss and transience and to the fact that desire is
fathomless and ultimately unfillable. At some point I realized that you don't
get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it, that you need to
agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.

You were lay-ordained in the lineage of Soto Zen in 1979. Although your
writing is not laden with Japanese imagery or Zen ideas, your work is often linked
with Zen Buddhism. What kind of influence has your study of Zen had on your
writing?

As I understand it, Zen practice is an investigation of who we are as human
beings, and of ordinary experience -- of knowing the taste of your own tongue
in your own mouth. If it weren't about everyone's experience it wouldn't
interest me. As with every spiritual tradition and practice there's in part a
specialized vocabulary and description, but in the end Zen is simply about
looking at human being and human nature, about how we are in the world and how
the world is. And as a poet, that is also what I want to explore.

The eight years I spent in full-time practice of Zen during my twenties made me
who I am; that experience and its continuing life in my life underlie
everything I've done since. Zen taught me how to pay attention, how to delve,
how to question and enter, how to stay with -- or at least want to try to stay
with -- whatever is going on. Still, there are no more explicit references to
Buddhism in my work than there are in the work of a number of people who have
never undertaken that kind of life. For quite a few years I didn't allow the
practice part of my life to become known -- not because it isn't important to
me but because it is private. Not everything belongs in the public realm. In
any case I'm not an overtly Buddhist poet in the way that, for example, Allen
Ginsberg was. But when I wrote the author's biographical note for
Women in Praise of the Sacred, I felt I
should disclose my own interest and background in the realm of spiritual
experience. That information doesn't appear in any of the poetry-book
biographies, though, because it doesn't belong there; knowing it may add
something, but it's not the governing fact for a reader of my work.

How do you think that the practice of Zen and the writing of poetry relate
to each other?

When I began writing one of the essays in Nine Gates, "Poetry and the
Mind of Indirection," I thought how odd it is that poetry seems to be a way of
thinking circuitously; instead of simply saying "I'm sad," a poem describes
rainfall or the droop of a branch. I thought this was a secondary way of
thinking, almost the reverse of the direct knowledge of experience a person
seeks in Zen meditation. But when I looked into it more deeply I found that
traveling by language from self into the world is also a primary way humans
understand experience. Language discovers and creates itself through metaphor,
and through that process external and internal words reveal their
interconnection. Metaphor isn't embellishment; its way of thinking came first
and abstract thought arose later, along with literacy. And so what may appear
to be indirection is in fact a fundamental way that we human beings understand
our lives -- through language that emerges from the body, from the tastes and
sensations and movements and gestures of our own bodies and from the body of
the earth all around us. In poetry, as in Zen practice, experience comes first.
My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as
possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little
further. To find out what happens if I ask, "What else, what next, what more, what
deeper, what hidden?" And to keep pressing into that endless realm, in many
different ways.

Awareness and self-consciousness are delicate matters. Trying to examine more
deeply what poems are and how they work has informed my life and brought me
great joy. I don't think that attentiveness ever diminishes experience. There
are times, however, when you don't want to be self-conscious. One is while
writing the first draft of a new poem. At that stage too much consciousness is
limiting and therefore damaging. It can wall off the permeable, the mysterious,
everything you don't already know. When I write, I don't know what is going to
emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of
concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving
into mystery. Everything I am and know and have lived goes into a poem. I hope
I'll never be governed by theoretical knowledge when I set out to write. Poems
are born in part from the history and culture of other poems, but in writing I
hope to learn a new thing, something fresh about what's going on in that
moment, in my own life and in the world. Craft consciousness is essential to
the finished poem, but comes later.

In your essay "The World is Large and Full of Noises: Thoughts on Translation" you write that "encountering Komachi's and Shikibu's poetry at
theage of eighteen ... taught me to see and feel differently, introduced to
my lifea new vocabulary of responses." Translating their work for your book
The
Ink Dark Moon must have furthered that sense of discovery. What
worlds have been revealed to you as a translator that were shut to you as a
reader?

I started reading classical-era Japanese literature and Chinese literature in
college, in translation; that was my introduction to the vocabulary of Buddhist
thought and of a different way of understanding one's life. Very specifically,
that was the new vocabulary of responses that the sentence you quote refers to.
The few poems by Komachi and
Shikibu that were available at that time in
English, as well as other works I came across, provided a new emotional and
intellectual context for experience that I shared. Many of the poems were about
love and love's losses, but described in a way I had never seen before,
within the context of transience as a spiritually acknowledged fact of human
existence. Finding my own experiences of the heart reflected across such a
great gap of time, culture, and language brought its own solace to my
tumultuous emotional life; I drew sustenance from the insight, the beauty, and
the simple companionship of the poems. The poems held a view of existence I
immediately felt as true but had not been able to articulate. It spoke to my
life and my heart, not only my mind.

Translating many more of those poems, fifteen years later, was another kind of
revelation. Discovering that I could make eight radically different
translations of one poem, with each reflecting some part of what was held in
the original, freed me from having such an anchored idea of what a poem is.
That part of the process taught me to value a greater openness and playfulness
of mind in meeting a poem, and also liberated me from the idea that there is
only one right response to anything -- perhaps from the idea that there is a
"right" response at all. It also brought me to a much greater freedom in
revising my own work. I understood more fully that there may be a core,
inchoate experience you're reaching for, but that there can be many different
ways to reach it. And it freed me from the idea that a first draft is something
you need to be tied to. It's not -- it's a gift with which you can then work,
without dishonoring the initial form.

With
Women in Praise of the Sacred you made even more
poetry available to English readers by compiling and exposing a wide collection
of voices from around the world. This must have been an overwhelming project.
What were the rewards and challenges of being a canonizer?

I never thought of myself as developing a canon while I was working on this
project. I began it because I was surprised to discover it didn't already
exist. I had looked for women's poems about their experience of the spiritual
and the sacred, found a few, and left it at that. But about a year later, my
conscience began to nag me. I thought, This is a book that should exist,
and I started asking around to see if there was someone who would know what
material there might be.

Having done The Ink Dark Moon four years earlier, I knew that the prevalent
belief about women's total silence through the centuries was a misconception. Of
course women's literature is not well known -- women have been suppressed,
their works have
been destroyed -- but I had also become very confident that anywhere men were
writing, women were writing, whether it was preserved or not. Women simply
couldn't be kept from doing this deeply human work of recording, shaping, and
discovering their experience through words. I wanted to slightly revise the
idea we all received from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own by
asserting that yes, it was hard, only a few survived, the social forces against
women were enormously powerful, but women have always found their way through
words and writing to a full life -- and here is the evidence for it. In fact,
the earliest author that we know by name was a woman, the Sumerian
moon-priestess Enheduanna, who wrote forty-three centuries ago. It's important
we know this if only to correct the great burden that many women still feel -- the burden of being the first, of inventing from scratch. There is a tradition.
And I find that companionship encouraging.

In "The World is Large and Full of Noises: Thoughts on Translation" you
note, "Many writers describe the attempt to bring the world into language as
itself an act of translation." The standard criticism of literary translation
is that a piece of writing does not survive intact the journey from one
language to the next that, as you've said, much is lost. In this light how does
a lived experience change when it is translated into words?

I'm not sure myself that the metaphor of translation is entirely accurate for
the relationship between experience and the poem that seems to come out of that
experience. Literally, translation means "carrying over," but it seems to me
the relationship between life and language isn't a carrying over but a further
creation -- a making of more life through words. Sensation, awareness, emotion,
can all exist in beings without language, but complex human consciousness is a
worded consciousness, to such a great degree that we often have to work hard to
rediscover the immediate life of the body, of the visual imagination, of the
senses. Poetry, of course, is a verbal realm in which that sense-born world is
of the essence. It is a place of interconnection, where mind and body, self
and
other, inner and outer, may meet. And so I see poetry not as an attempt to
accurately depict an experience already known but as the making of a new
experience that presses into some place not yet known. I write poems when I am
perplexed, aroused, suffering, curious, uncentered. The poem tries to answer
that puzzlement, to expand the boundary of what I can know and understand; in
that extended understanding what was shimmering at the periphery can now come
into the core. A good poem is a bit like a volcanic island. It creates new
terrain of the soul.

You have been active in the writing community -- both in the Bay Area where
you live and nationally -- teaching, publishing your work, giving readings
and interviews. To you, what is poetry's place in the public realm?

What I first fell in love with was writing poetry. The public-life side of it -- where you go out and give readings and interviews and teach -- came to me as
a surprise. But I entered that life, and the question of poetry's place in the
public realm is fascinating. Before writing was invented, poetry's role in the
public realm was to hold all knowledge in a shape in which it could be
remembered; all the technical aspects of poetry were developed to preserve
hard-won understanding and knowledge with accuracy over time. Over the
millennia, with the advent of writing, that role has shifted. Now the role of
poetry is not simply to hold understanding in place but to help create and hold
a realm of
experience. Poetry has become a kind of tool for knowing the world in a
particular way.

In poetry's current manifestation -- and by current I mean at least the past
couple of hundred years -- it is the place where the thinking of the heart,
mind, and body come together. Its role is to forge a musical, intellectual, and
emotional knowledge in which those different dimensions of human consciousness
can be brought into one field where we can be fully human. The role of the
arts, especially in our increasingly technological culture, is to discover and
preserve that way of interconnected thinking. If we forget these other parts of
being human -- the connection of human life to the life of rocks and trees and
animals and weather -- then we will lose any sense of proportion about how we
ought to be in the universe, amid a wider existence.

What do you see as the relationships between poetry and poets and poetry
and non-poets?

People talk about poetry's having a diminished life in the current culture, or
else they talk about its current renaissance, but I think that in good times or
bad times for poetry as a whole, people will always have periods in their lives
when they turn to poetry. Dealing with grief or falling in love, people will
look for a poem or perhaps write one in the attempt to sort through and
understand their most powerful experiences. Or, for the occasions of large
transition -- a marriage or a funeral -- they will ask someone to read a poem
that marks and holds the feeling. One of the jobs of poets is to keep making
those holding words available, so that when other people need them they will be
there.

I was deeply moved when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's lover Maurice Tempelsman read Cavafy's poem
"Ithaka" at her funeral -- and when it was then
reprinted
in every major newspaper in the country. "Ithaka" is an important and
astonishing poem that holds enormous wisdom about what actually takes place in
the scope of a life, and his bringing it forward on the occasion of her death
made it available for everyone. The poem served the public purpose of shared
grief and could then stay in the mind for private understanding. I think for
poetry to have that kind of life in a culture is enough. It would be wonderful
if more people wanted to read poetry every day, but it's more important that
the poems be there when people need them.